The Holder of the World (17 page)

Gabriel Legge was not fated to be killed or maimed that day. Lust and luck had always governed his life. Though Zeb-un-nissa’s hovel was badly charred by Higginbottham’s obsessive loathing, and her thatch roof entirely burned, the lovers copulating in a cement bath tank filled with star-chilled water and floating lotuses were spared all but a shower of sparks. Villagers still tell of an eight-foot naked
firangi
giant who was seen in the alley, glistening, tumescent, blister backed, hurling brick walls and burning buffalo out of his way.

MONTHS LATER
Hannah would realize that while she’d wept and raged over the confluence of Gabriel’s lust and Higginbottham’s obsessions, Destiny was ensnaring her life into Roopconda’s larger history.

A true Englishman owed his wife discretion. So discreet were long-term residents that their half-English children grew up within sight of their fathers’ wives without ever being acknowledged. Bibis were at times emboldened, like Zeb-un-nissa, to pay visits to White Towns and to White Houses, under the guise of milkmaid or washerwoman, just in the hope of capturing the
firangi
wife in a kind of paralyzed tableau.

Hannah was a stranger to all these conventions. The explosion and the indisputable disclosures in its wake shattered her marriage as definitively as a bat bite had ended Higginbottham’s.

All around her now, she saw chaos. New Salem, shared with an arrogant wench who had fathered Gabriel’s son, in a society that had effectively turned on her for her husband’s piracies, was a prison that no amount of riches could soften. She had lived with, and accepted, the possibility that Gabriel might never return from any of his voyages, and that uncertainty had bound her closer to him. But the certain knowledge of his unfaithfulness, his preference of a bibi to her, was a matter that her pride would not permit forgiveness.

We might call the explosion, the attendant shame and the arrogant visit of the bibi a very loud wake-up call, a sign to Hannah that tolerance and patience and even a pragmatic tradeoff between luxury and uncertainty were no longer sufficient, no longer bearable.

She made up her mind that she would be gone from the Coromandel on the next appropriate sailing, for London. She asked Bhagmati, her only true companion, to make the voyage, but the servant would not cross the dark waters, would not desert the small shrine she kept for Henry Hedges. Bhagmati still walked the parapets, now in the empty palace home in New Salem, dressed in her silks and sometimes dressed in his.

Until the passage could be arranged, Hannah moved back to Fort St. Sebastian, to stay with Martha Ruxton, while her trunks could be packed. It would be, she felt, a clean break. Service in India was a well-known widow-maker, and that was the status she intended to claim in England. She was an alert and accomplished woman, thirty years of age and childless. Hubert had long before sewn the idea of Cambridge, of domestic service as a governess.

It would be a bleak, gray, dismal life, she feared, after some of the excitements and colors and violence of the Coromandel Coast. But a life without treachery, without killings. Her life would reside in other people’s stories; she would have stories to tell someone’s children.

Tringham was brought to Dr. Ruxton’s house after his penitential tour of the outlying villages. The excision was clean—thanks, perhaps, to the high-bridged, prominent nose of the young Yorkshireman that had given the butcher an adequate target. But what a ghastly sight it was, how casually cruel to inflict an unavoidable, undisguisable mark that serves no purpose and threatens no life, in the center of a face.

Hannah remembered the scalpings, the brandings, the blown-away faces of Salem, and the surgeries she had practiced to good advantage. She remembered the injured boy in Stepney, whose wounds were incomparably more serious. Ruxton had only heard of the various dismemberments wrought by native laws—they seemed bent on excising every limb or digit for one offense or another, including the ears and eyes, which made crude sense—but a nose, an English nose, was a gratuitous insult to England, to manhood and to a surgeon’s skills.

“I can help,” said Hannah. It was to be her final act in India. Tringham, too, rebuffed by the Mughals and now humiliated before his countrymen, had decided to book passage with Hannah on the same packet ship to England. But he intended to disembark in the Cape.

Calling on her knowledge of suturing, and of the skin’s ability to bond to itself, Hannah convinced the doctor, and the patient, that a nose of sorts could be fashioned from a flap of skin cut like a wedge from the forehead, twisted in a fashion to suggest gristle, then joined again to the cheeks.

He would look syphilitic, perhaps, the doctor opined, but otherwise improved. Hannah had a surgeon’s touch, but it was all he could do to dissuade her from sacrificing a joint of the wretch’s little finger and grafting it to the stump of bone already exposed. All in all, the Cape might be a solution. Despite the red hair, he might find a home among noseless people.

12

WITH TWO WEEKS
to go, and the December cyclone season upon them, Bhagmati made her to way to the Ruxtons’ house and begged her mistress to reconsider. The master was drinking heavily, he had grown careless and abusive, and now he was at sea in a dangerous season, in a bad temper.

She had had a dream. The dream was about Gabriel. Within hours he would be back home again. She had seen him in a masoola boat heavy with chests. There hadn’t been room in the boat for sailors. Not even for the Marquis. But she had also dreamed of corpses. Bodies bobbed like gulls on the waves. The bodies, impaled by Mughals’ spears, shriveled like fallen fruit in the forest.

“Please come home. One last time,” she begged.

Hannah took the dream to be Bhagmati’s euphemism for gossip overheard in the marketplace. Fishermen must have spied the
Esperance
on the open roadstead. Boatmen were unloading booty even now, and ferrying in small portions of it to the customhouse. The rest of the loot, the Marquis and his sailors would load with weights and dump in the shallows until retrieval was safe. Haider Beg maintained a reasonably efficient but still bribable force to round up beaching pirates. The Marquis was wily about local ways. He knew whom to bribe and whom to intimidate. It was all part of the Great Game. And she was sick of the Great Game.

There were trunks to pack, friendships to end with promises of letters, and so she went back to New Salem, hoping to avoid her husband. Gabriel had been sullen but fair-minded. She would have resettlement money, and he agreed to forward cash to her at regular intervals for the next few years, or as long as his business prospered. She would miss the warmth of his returns, standing with him on the roof as he pointed out the whirlpools and sandbars he’d braved, and thrilling her with his gargantuan tales.

From the roof, the sky seemed unusually bright, unusually high. The domed sky bounced giddy rays of light off fishermen’s sails. She would not allow herself to think of typhoons. She would not get over the fear she herself had felt when those short years ago the
Fortune
had anchored in deep waters offshore, and she had had to lower herself into a
kuttamaram
crammed with Lancashire maidens, most of whom had now married and scattered like buckshot across the Coromandel and Malabar coasts, the spaniels, a harpsichord and a cherrywood cabinet. She would not let Martha Ruxton’s stories of “country boates spleet into peeces” repeat themselves, over and over.

She discerned a pinnace far out to sea. Not the
Esperance
. The
Esperance
could not show itself during the day.

Toward dawn, in an eerie dream, Gabriel cried to her for help. She ran to the balcony, pulling the rusted latch off the door in her anxiety. Again she heard the moan of someone in pain and need. But it was only the rough wind scraping seas and forests. The wind blew from the northwest; it blew with such fury that it tore thatched roofs off fishermen’s huts; it lifted oxen and horses from their tetherings and hurled them in the surf-striated black waves of the churned-up bay.

THEN SHE SAW
the light boat by the sandbar. It was the kind of boat that Martha Ruxton, always scornful of local skills, had derided as “a country boate fit for Moores, Zentoos, hogs and swine and coolies.” But this boat’s sail riveted Hannah’s attention. This sail was not of patched and moldy canvas that local fishermen and ferriers dried on dunes between trips. Scarlet silk glowed against the sapphire sky. This was a boat fit for the most audacious New World fortune builder or the most disdainful Old World pirate king. She prayed that the Nawab’s troops hadn’t seen what she’d seen.

She watched and waited impatiently for the craft to grow larger, splash closer to the shore. But it remained tiny, its movements erratic and jerky. Sailors were trying to pole the craft away from the bar into deeper waters. But sand sucked their poles and swallowed the prow. Gale winds snapped the mast and loosened the blood-red flag of silk.

It happened so suddenly that Hannah wasn’t sure if she had seen it or imagined it. The wind caught the boat atop a sandy crested wave, lifted it, spilling all deckhands into the water, then turned it over and dashed it on the heads of the sailors and beasts before they’d even oriented themselves in the water. She saw the bobbing and sinking of spheres (human heads?) and of rectangles (chests of silk and brocade?). Men struggled out from under the upturned craft and were swept away by ferocious currents.

In the quickly lightening dawn, she watched the boat crumple like straw with each crashing breaker. And then she saw a force of destruction gather upon the beach that she had never seen and always feared: a crowd, a small army, an armed guard of the Nawab’s men making their way across the wind-torn roadway to the half-beached hulk. The bodies of
firangi
sailors, most of them drowned but some still struggling, were chopped and speared as the soldiers passed. It was a scene of mass murder on top of a furious cyclone.

Bhagmati tried to pull her away. Bhagmati took charge; Hannah was shaking from the cold and wind, the sight of men she now recognized being hauled upon the beach and stabbed some more. She let herself be draped in lengths of coarse cotton such as Bhagmati wore. Tough-palmed hands daubed muddy brownness on her white forehead and cheeks. White Town, Bhagmati urged, was a place to flee. The mobs were stoning the enclave walls. The rumor had started in the
qsba
and spread, fueled by the Nawab’s men. His soldiers were already patrolling beaches and trails for
firangis
who had sacked another Mecca-bound pilgrim ship. Muslim boatmen, pilots, traders, were spilling infidel blood to avenge sacrilege. The Nawab had received word of the piracy from the Company, from Higginbottham himself. The Company intended to show no mercy to
firangi
interlopers like the Marquis and Gabriel Legge.

The Marquis had left instructions with association wives for just such precipitous escapes. They were to get in touch with Count Attila Csycsyry at his punch house, and he’d billet them in safe huts until enough of the Nawab’s men could be bought to look the other way. But Bhagmati could not place her faith in dishonesty, nor in a drinker’s promises. She had her own getaway plans. She hustled Hannah down the hill, over the bridge and into a shaky settlement of washermen in Black Town. So Hannah did not witness the Marquis’s drowning nor Cutlass da Silva’s mutilation.

BUT THERE WAS
a witness to the beach happenings. The fisherman’s child who had watched the lovers in happier times, years later, in a cold, lonely attic in London, retrieved the memory in rhyme. The manuscript fragment of
The World-Taker
that has survived opens with a shocking soliloquy summarizing that night’s events. The manuscript’s current owner in Calcutta, a Marwari businessman of taste, will not permit any portion of it to be copied. The prohibition derives from his nationalism. He has no wish to expose the fragment to Western scholars who will note in it only a sad mimicry of lesser Dryden and Pope. An asset hunter thrills to the chase. The few lines I remember verbatim I remember for the clues they contain:

O, how I dread to tread again
Sonapatnam’s shores of blood and pain!
Cursed was that day when I
Spied the slain Marquis ascend the sky
.
One cruel death ought reveal lessons wise
,
But the celestials dispensed one more prize
.
Cutlass da SiIva’s tongue to a board was nailed;
Justice is e’er meted, dear and bejewelled
.

So the Marquis died that night. Cutlass da Silva had his tongue cut out. That gruesome soliloquy does not mention Gabriel.

THE DETAILS
are given to me by Mr. Abraham as we walk around the ruins of the customhouse. That night of massacre became a guidebook’s lore.

Mr. Abraham says, “These chaps suddenly found themselves between devil and deep blue, if you get my drift only. One sec they are discoursing so merrily, dividing up their loot, and the next sec they and their belongings are all tumbling topsy-turvy in the drink. November, December, are very bad months here, you see. Very treacherous. So what is happening is this. The boat is sticking in sandbar. You know the Lord Tennyson poem, ‘Crossing the Bar’? Tennyson is thinking of this Madras-side sandbar only. The pirate chaps are huffing and puffing but nothing is happening. Then suddenly wind is dislodging the bloody boat! The boat is now like an upside-down bowl. The de Mussy fellow and that Portuguese chap, they are good swimmers, isn’t it? They are somehow managing to struggle from under the boat, they’re managing to wade neck-deep on sandbar. All is well for them, you are thinking. In the meantime the English fellow is sitting tight inside the upturned boat. He is thinking, My God, am I in a cave or a whale’s belly or what? The good Lord is listening to him and the good Lord is creating an air pouch in the water for the Englishman, this Legge. And the boat is hiding him from the eyes of the angry Muslim mob. But the other two chaps are not so lucky. The good Lord is always finding jolly good means to punish sinners and devils. An arrow is piercing de Mussy’s skull. So de Mussy is dead on spot, which means he is luckier than the Cutlass fellow. Cutlass is not bothering to see if he can give succor to his wounded friend. Oh, no. He’s a selfish fellow. He is just running and running. And wham! He is running into the mob. The rest is not a pretty story.”

Cutlass da Silva, Mr. Abraham confirms, had his tongue cut out, but the tongue was not nailed to a board as described in the soliloquy. The tongue was actually nailed to da Silva’s chest and da Silva himself then nailed to a plank and dumped into the Bay of Bengal, where he was accused, falsely, of having dumped three hundred haj-bound pilgrims.

“So you see, there could be no moaning of the bar as he put to sea, clever, isn’t it? No tongue, no moan.”

And what happened to Gabriel? Knowledge, as Venn would say, comes from purity of design. Data without design is a muddle. The data on Gabriel’s death had been given to me the day I stumbled on Hannah’s things stuffed in a cardboard box in the hallway of the maritime museum in Marblehead. I just didn’t know where the data fit, it was so long ago. Gabriel Legge lived a comparatively long life, dying in 1720, and is buried in the British Cemetery in Calcutta.

THE FOREIGN TRAVELER
from the “Salem Bibi” series
c. 1700
9.5 cm × 11.3 cm
Provenance: The Museum of Maritime Trade
Anonymous Loan

This is the starkest in the series. The artist executes his vision in frugal lines. An emaciated
firangi
in a Muslim ascetic’s garb stands beside a low white wall. The dense, almost-black forest backdrops the figure. Actually, there are two figures; a seductive, veiled, dark-skinned woman extends a gold-bangled arm toward him. In the woods, we see the eyes of demon forms, tigers, half-human, multiheaded monsters. In the pigmentless area behind the wall, I make out no path or road that a traveler might pursue. The traveler’s eyes are sunken; blue pits in a bony gray oval. He stares straight at the viewer, or at the artist, who might well be sitting in the courtyard of a half-completed palace. A cap of embroidered cloth sits too low, too loose, on a shrunken forehead. Wisps of mustard-yellow hair hang limp over a saggy, wrinkled earlobe. The chest is bare, long, narrow. The ribs bulge through the tent of gray-blue skin. The wrists are opalescent, crisscrossed with lapis capillaries.

There is little doubt the figure is Gabriel, and the painting a concentrated story of how he survived the drownings and butcheries of December 1700. If I had to title the painting I might call it
Entry into the Garden
. It seems in every way a reversal of the familiar expulsion myths of Adam and Eve from Eden, Adam’s fall, sinning all.

In December 1700, Hannah became, to her satisfaction, husbandless.

History was already rewriting her fate. Her passage to England was nearly complete. Face smudged with lampblack, wrapped in white khadi, shivering in a servant’s hut, Hannah was still retrievable. Poor Tringham, after all, was packed, partially healed, face wrapped in a scarf, waiting at the docks. And Hannah, rather than waking up and fleeing for her freedom, felt a heaviness in her bones, a fatigue, that wouldn’t go away.

Shock, depression, rejection—we have words for it now. The fatigue that doesn’t lift. A moral collapse. Or a vision of the future that the body refuses to endorse.

All she wanted was sleep. She didn’t care who came and went; she slept like a local through heat and light and noise. The packet ship came and loaded, and went. Hannah Legge did not board and was thought to have died in the riots, and her piratical husband to have drowned.